Mardy Grothe Quotes

The arts can play a vital role in revitalizing neighborhoods, using and improving vacant space, bringing new jobs and new sense of opportunity, and improving public safety by generating more foot traffic and more eyes on the street.

I was really interested in how a health care center could also be a center for the arts and for music, and for bringing together sort of the isolated elements of the community.

It's easy for me to care about Toronto, because Toronto is a community that cares about itself. It represents the world. It talks to itself, and because it does, it figures out that there must be a music garden as part of its existence.

I went to big, broken, under-resourced public schools, but we had a real sense of community, because those were days in the '50s and the '60s when every child was under the jurisdiction of every single adult on the block.

The difference that a drama group or a cinema club can make to a small village or a town. It opens people up to ideas, potential about themselves that really, in a way, education often fails to. It's a way of drawing a community together.

I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.

Every small town has its dramatic group, its barber-shop quartet, every home has music in one form or another.

Music is nothing but a door opener to meet families and their children and the elderly.

I like the fact that Austin's the first place I've ever lived where there's a real sense of community. People care about their neighbors.

The idea is to bring art to people who might never really interact with it. It's for all citizens, and it's about making the city more interesting and more visually significant.

Never miss the ham breakfast or the chili supper.... Spend a lot of time listening.

I grew up in a nonprofit theater company in the heartland of central California, so I am very aware of the importance that company had not only on my life but my community.

I want to work on reaching out to people, through my music, at the grass-roots level.

Outwardly seeing how your music effects culture and everyday life, is amazing.

If folks really want music in their community they can do it very cheaply. It doesn't have to be a $50 million program. All we need is just a little real estate.

Something that I think extends to a lot of African cultures is that the line between performer and audience is blurry. My mom would lead the wedding song regularly, and she isn't a professional singer. Even as an audience member, you're expected to clap and sing the response to the lead.

What if cities embraced a culture of sharing? I see a future of shared cities that bring us community and connection instead of isolation and separation.

I want to be a part of a vibrant culture and have a more open culture.

Building community is to the collective as spiritual practice is to the individual.

I would encourage people to bridge broadly and creatively in their communities, not just because that creates the most fun and resiliency, but also because it creates the most points of access for people to be part of the community, which is what democracy is at its best.

We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other. We urgently need to bring the neighbor back into our hoods, not only in our inner cities but also in our suburbs, our gated communities, on Main Street and Wall Street, and on Ivy League campuses.

You can’t go through life not listening to music.

We lost the connection between the entertainment world and the neighborhoods.

The arts give us our identity as a community; they also draw new people, fresh visions, and renewable economic opportunity to our community.

It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other.